Boys I Have Tried And Failed To Seduce: A Trilogy

April 4, 2011

PRELUDE

Despite my Asperger’s, misanthropy and general surliness, I did manage to have two extremely brief relationships in my teens.

J1 and I went out for a few months when I was in grade seven. Everything seemed to be going well until he started calling me on the phone and expecting me to call back. I was pretty fond of him but, to paraphrase Meatloaf, I would have done anything for like (but I wouldn’t do that). If analogue clocks are the Sauron of my autistic odyssey, telephones are definitely the Saruman. I didn’t hate the part where I actually talked to him, but making or receiving calls proved to be more than I was willing to invest in a relationship with a boy who loved Metallica over me, so I just stopped calling. He ended up dumping me and taking up with another girl while I was home with pneumonia. I felt nothing but relief and gratitude.

J2 and I had a brief flirtation when I was sixteen. We spent half of our summer watching movies and making out. Then I decided that I wanted to share one of my favourite films, Videodrome, with him. He thought that I was showing him a porn flick to get into his pants. He was half right: I had been trying to get into said pants, but whatever yearning I had for him quickly fizzled in light of his assessment of my precious Videodrome. Didn’t he get any of the underlying themes of mass media control? Did he really think that I just sat around at night, rubbing one out to the new flesh? Could I really fuck someone who wasn’t smart enough for Cronenberg?

As it turns out, I couldn’t. And so he moved on to someone whose genitals weren’t governed by Canadian cinema and I spent the rest of the summer trying to write scathing songs about him with lyrics like “But he thinks Videodrome is just about sex/ And his eyes went blank when I said ‘McLuhanesque.’”

Unfortunately, it turns out that girls who rhyme “sex” with “McLuhanesque” don’t get to have the former in high school. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. The language of love is supposed to be universal, but my adolescent self desperately needed an interpreter.